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Sport

06th Oct 2015

Eamon Dunphy: The Premier League is full of ‘spivs’

The RTÉ pundit is falling out of love with the English game

Tony Cuddihy

Eamon Dunphy says he is becoming ‘sour’ towards Premier League football and has hit out at the number of foreign managers in the English top flight.

Speaking to Game On on 2fm, Dunphy said that cheating has enveloped the game and it compares poorly to rugby in terms of the number of incorrect decisions by referees.

“You have to be foreign (to be a Premier League manager) for as start, you have no English managers now,” said Dunphy.

“They (managers) are like guys out of a soap opera. To generalise you could say that cheating on the pitch is endemic.

PlatiniMichel

“Look at rugby, it’s impeccable. Every decision is the right decision because they have the TMO. Off the pitch, the spivery. Look at FIFA, look at UEFA. Platini, $2million, he is under investigation.”

Dunphy then attacked clubs – West Brom, for some reason, in particular – for raising the prices of tickets despite vastly increased television money.

“And all the time the ticket prices are going up and the other thing that is going up is the television money. They should use the television money to lower ticket prices to allow people into games. West Brom increased their ticket prices this year, West Brom!”

Jose Mourinho did not escape Eamon’s forked tongue.

“I am getting increasingly sour in my attitude towards the Premier League,” added Dunphy.

“It’s because of bad behaviour of people like Mourinho. Not just Mourinho, Ferguson was shocking when he was manager of Manchester United.

“The bad behaviour of players on the pitch, the cheating. The one thing that stands out, the Chelsea match is a good example at the weekend, Southampton should have had two penalties.

“Every time you watch a soccer match you see a vital incident and it’s a game changer, they won’t use video evidence. Every other sport in the world (does) but because this man Platini doesn’t want it to happen, it can’t happen.

“It’s a badly run sport and a lot of the people in it are spivs.”